User blog:Deadcoder/Deadcoder's Reviews: Franz Hopper (Episode)
I decided to review the episode Franz Hopper for a complicated reason. One of the reasons that Evolution was terrible was that every attack was either subtle or just a psychological attack. This episode has the same trait. In fact, if you tweaked it somewhat for continuity, it could easily be an Evolution episode. Yet, I remember this episode being good. To get a fresh view on it, I decided to rewatch it, to see if it really was a good episode, or if it was bad, but seemed okay thanks to quality osmosis from a season with decent episodes. My scoring system is simple: 10 - 0 with 10 being amazing, and 0 being Melanie Tran's acting. Let the review begin! =The Review= Franz Hopper starts off with the warriors gathering at the factory, with there being 5 activated towers. I get the feeling that in a deleted scene, it would be revealed that XANA activated 4 decoy towers to hide the Carthage one, but that's just an opinion. The fact XANA did a decoy tower in an Evolution episode does give this theory some weight though. Back to the episode... They discover Franz Hopper, having escaped the supercomputer, deactivating the towers from the Factory Interface. He gives some backstory that later is revealed to be true, aside from the thing about Aelita. Franz's dialog was kind of an infodump, but I suspect that it made sense in universe, so we'll let it slide. Later, Jeremie and Aeltia discuss this in Jeremie's room. I thought this scene was kind of flat, given that these are two people who flirt, alone with eachother. The next day, we find out it's Jeremie's birthday, and we have a scene related to that. We hear some continuity about the school for gifted children. They decide to visit Franz at the factory. Franz is horrified that they used the Scanners on humans, claiming that they're not safe for that. When I first saw this episode, I thought that made sense. You're literally turning people into data via what is probably controlled radiation, and dumping them in a computer which has major reliability problems. Since this is going to turn out to be a X.A.N.A. scheme, it turns out the only person affected is Yumi. The next scene is the aftermath. Personally, I think this played out like a soap opera scene, where a main character would find out they had cancer. There is an odd subtle aspect to the scene. The characters act out the different stages of grief. Yumi starts with denial, Odd and Ulrich both do anger, Jeremie tries bargaining, then Yumi does depression, and Aelita is sort of doing acceptance by inaction. This carries into the dinner scenes in the Cafeteria and Yumi's house. We see the characters in the cafeteria fight, and yumi is depressed at her home. Her mom thinks it's just a teenage crisis. Everyone aside from Aelita and Jeremie blame Jeremie for the issue, claiming that he's the smart one, and should have seen this coming. Jeremie stops putting up with it and leaves. Seeing the drama, Aelita encounters the Aelita options: :0. Act suicidal and/or crazy. :1. Attack it with a long single note of angry music. :2. Have an argument with it. :3. Use Energy Fields. Considering that everyone else is crazy right now, she can'd do 0. This isn't season 3 yet, so 3 is out, and this isn't Lyoko, so 1 is out. Argument it is! and she points out that without the scanners, she wouldn't be there. Then, everyone goes to bed angry and depressed. I thought this act was amazingly well acted, and well written. While the characters aren't acting rationally, they are acting realistically, and that made this scene great. Yumi is depressed, and like always, is trying to hold it in. Jeremie is actually trying to solve a problem, and failing spectacularly "like always." Aelita is torn between sympathy for Yumi and Jeremie. Ulrich and Odd are both blaming Jeremie for what they view to be his fault, claiming that he's the alleged brains behind their operation, despite his absurdly high failure rate that really should have shown them otherwise by now. They view him as directly responsible for Yumi's suffering. In a way, they're right. Jeremie kept the supercomputer on so he could get Aelita off of it, allowing XANA to attack, which was the reason they had to use the scanners in the first place. Being the savant that he is, Jeremie is distraught about accidentally hurting a friend and wanting to fix it. Everyone was realistic and strong for this kind of scene. HEY! MELANIE TRAN! THIS IS HOW ONE IS SUPPOSED TO ACT! MAYBE YOU SHOULD GET A REFUND ON YOUR ACTING LESSONS, AND USE THE MONEY TO BUY THIS EPISODE ON DVD! YOUR PERFORMING WILL PROBABLY IMPROVE! The next day, they put their differences aside, and meet at the factory. Franz tells them his alleged plan to use the deathtrap scanners to go to sector 5 for the last data on Aelita's virus. Franz tells Jeremie to stay out of the way. Given how everything Jeremie makes breaks down at a critical point, I think that this makes sense, or at least it does until the infamous line "And you're the one who let XANA destroy my diary!" After that, Jeremie leaves, and decides to transfer schools. If you listen closely, you can hear that they use the season 1 virtualization music for the virtualization scene here. I don't know if this means anything. Later, Jeremie realizes that Franz shouldn't have known about that. He looks at the destroyed CDs, realizing that they were cut with XANA's logo, because XANA loves motifs. On Lyoko, we see 3 of the warriors in carthage, dealing with creepers. It looks like season 1 lighting, even though it's not. If you look closely, the energy blade effect that they used with Ulrich is the same one they used with William later in seasons 3 and onward. Next, Aelita is due to be virtualized, until Jeremie walks in, and sushes her. She later gets dumped in the desert. At this point, Jeremie becomes an idiot. He knows that Franz is an imposer, and is actually XANA. And he confronts him about it. What happens next is exactly what you expect. At the same time, everyone else except Aelita loses their weapons, and they're forced to flee. On top of that, XANA-Franz breaks the materialization process, so if they loose their life points, they die. Continuing the plot twist chain of DOOM, the Scyphozoa shows up at Aelita. We see the Aelita options again: :0. Act suicidal and/or crazy. :1. Attack it with a long single note of angry music. :2. Have an argument with it. :3. Use Energy Fields. For some stupid reason, she is captured, hence 0. Yumi, Odd, and Ulrich figure out what's going on when they find the Carthage tower. Odd forgets that his claws can damage monsters, and instead we are "treated" to a slapstick wrestling scene with a creeper and odd. Oh, and Ulrich's Katana is in the sheath, probably due to an animation error, and nobody notices. Unlike Odd, who is still fooling around, Ulrich thinks to get rid of the creeper. The Scyphozoa takes Aelita's memories, only to find out that it's a fake Aelita. This causes the scyphozoa's head to turn into a rave, and the scyphozoa to start having a seizure. The season 2 virtualization music starts, with Jeremie laughing like an idiot while XANA gets annoyed. We see Aelita on Jeremie's laptop in the scanner room, controlling a clone. She might also be animating the series, from what we see of her screenshot. This next part was kind of stupid. The Franz spectre disappears for no reason, allowing Jeremie to undo the damage. I'm going to assume that they put a virus in the Aelita clone's fake memories that caused XANA to delete it, but it doesn't seem like they had time to do that. Because of this suspicious plot convenience, Jeremie is able to undo the damage XANA did to the system. The just in time trope is played, again, as he finishes the code just soon enough to prevent Ulrich from being murdered. Aelita goes to the ice sector to use the transport orb, "And give us some scenery." The spectre returns to suffocate Jeremie. We get some amazing suffocation sounds from Sharron Mann. Because the Manta becomes an idiot at precisely the right second, Aelita is able to get to the tower and deactivate it. Cue creepy effects that seem like something Stephen King probably thought of first. Afterwards, Jeremie checks over Yumi, and determines that she's actually fine, despite all common sense. And Jeremie decides not to transfer, since they need a smart person whose not their tower deactivation person. Review Summary This episode had a lot more drama than normal. The grief scenes were strong and well acted without getting too over the top. There were flaws though. In addition to some questionable 3D animation, with errors and odd lighting; there were some plot issues. Jeremie was an idiot going to see the spectre, knowing it could kill him. The facts that Jeremie didn't even put in any effort to fight the spectre, and the thing just suddenly dissipated before the suffocation scene, and the manta suddenly flew at a convenient point, were all flaws in the story. My overall rating is 8.5/10. It would have been a 10, but the plot flaws in the end knocked off a point, and the 3D animation issues knocked off another half a point. Category:Blog posts Category:Franz Hopper (Episode)